4.11.03

Speed is God. Speed rules the night, the dreamscapes that make up my everyday existence. The thousand sounds and images that flow like an attention deficit disorder reality. Speed ruled over reality, making it become a surge of electricity. Now I try to approach those landscapes, and they’re mostly gone.

My longest poem was written at three in the morning. Listening to Bitches’ Brew, I became the music inside the body of the text that was being written by the sound of Miles Davis’ squeals. I was drinking 100% pure Colombian coffee; I cried that night, just for life. I cried for life in general, and in that moment I stopped caring about freedom: the world became a nightmare of people viewed as constant anonymous figures pulsing in front of me. I cried, because there is no escape.

An even longer poem was written in my head that night. I finished it at six a.m., surrounded by silence, until the alarm went off.

“Too much coffee”, I told myself. “Better cut down.”

Jazz is speed, electric cocaine, so it is no surprise that the first time I got hooked on the speed of reality was with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Acknowledgement. Resolution. Pursuance. Approximately a liter of coffee and thirty minutes of constant exercise. Almost nude, covered in sweat, the flaccid body giving way to the supernatural body gestating inside. I closed my eyes and kept the constant rhythm of the music captivate the rhythms of my heart, the rhythms of my silent speech. The room smelled of sweat and coffee beans, the mouth stench of too many cups of Java flowing in my veins. Speed became my captain; life became a free jazz exercise. This experience lasted ten years.

There are times when I find myself smiling at the recognition of my own madness, when I look inside my past and I see the habit of forming alliances with everything that allowed me to be experiencing life at its most intense.

I’ve always been afraid of cocaine, so that’s why.

It keeps me talking, you know, caffeine. It makes me laugh uncontrollably at something very funny. It keeps me away from inertia, makes me want to understand everything, every single piece of the information pie had to be taken into consideration, and everything was allowed to explode in my mind. Sometimes I ended up enclosed in my quarters for an entire day; just looking at blanks screens, white pages or paper to grade. I liked it, kept me away from trying to understand everything.

Remember seeing my long lost mother in the horizons, seeing her while I took my fourth foam cup of coffee made me feel like I was unto something. I was in the middle of a therapy, and all around me, grown ups were resting on the floor, trying to overcome the fear of knowing themselves. The therapist wanted us to picture ourselves in the quietest, safest of places. I ended up telling him I saw myself on the corridors of the school we both work at. “Don’t be a hypocrite” he told me, “wash your memories from school, go back to the place where you belong.” I ended up in front of the image of my mother. Became disgusted with the idea that all this time, I’ve been looking for my dead mother. Such a simplistic notion didn’t relate with the way I saw myself: on top of buildings, flying high on speed, watching the velocity of time as it passed me by, feeling the wind tremble out the hair in my skin, making me suffer by constantly reminding me that life doesn’t exist.

I’m a product of the times, a charming, polite, inscecure man with a ridiculous amount of caffeine in his body, and a ridiculous need to please. Veins pop out every time I imagine them. Veins are the expressways to my deepest fears, almost all of them involving the rest of the people in this world.

“You don’t look stressed” they always tell me (who are they? the people, the ones outside of myself, strangers and familiar faces, all looking at me like I’m some kind of human. Don’t feel like a human, I’m just another creature wanting to get out) I don’t look stressed because my eyes are constantly feeling things, the details of reality scratching the surface of this barrier called skin.

This was all due to the caffeine, you know.

The nervous tics the constant pinching of my left middle finger the pinching of my right earlobe (you see, so as to establish a sort of equilibrium, left finger, right earlobe) the burn in my stomach the sensational surge of caffeine coming down the esophagus like some torrent of fulfilled desire the eyes popping out of their sockets the voices of the people and ideas ideas and more ideas just flowing never ending just coming over to some mind romper room never stopping even when I was trying to sleep the ideas conclusions delusions the connections that intuition foresees like some incoming river some incoming wave never stopped never came to an end.

A lucid addiction for a society gone insane.

In my mind, there have been about three different social revolutions, and in each one, I participated as the main hero, the warrior that liberates with the impulse of his own courage.

That’s when I acquired a strange fear of dying in a lynch mob. I also became sarcastic, manic depressive and seriously ill. I started drinking more Coca Cola, besides the already substantial amount of coffee.

Life became a dreamscape reality, a sonic visual force that allowed me to fly through space and time at 120 360 kbps.

I got used to laughing at myself when driving in the car.

On weekends, alcohol became the only island that let me rest for awhile. I fell in love with life during the weekends, only to come back afraid it could all just shut down. I thought reality was a TV show, struggling dearly not to be turned off by the strange old woman sitting on a sofa in some mid forgotten place the world came to design. I thought of building an army built around the idea of getting rid of this old woman. We would trace the world in search of that elusive look on her face, the look that says “no more”.

Life became the burning sensation of speed touching upon the silver linings of a fragmented world. The only way to survive was to enjoy the velocity of time; no need for patience, just sit back and relax while the world and its nuisances are born, develop, mature and softly die in the blink of an eye.

Wishes became an unusual assortment of artificial paradises: they arrived just at the exact moment you wished for them, and disappeared just as quickly as you thought them.

Sometimes I couldn’t go to work, afraid my charade would suddenly be revealed. Never in my life have I been able to figure out what this supposed charade is.

I had a system:

You make a pitcher of coffee. You pour yourself a mug, and then you let it get cold for a while. Just at the exact moment the coffee is just hot enough so it still tastes good, you just pour it all down your throat.

You can drink coca cola with a lot of ice, in the summer, so it helps you with everyday chores like painting the house, sweeping the floor, washing the car. You turn up the volume, you listen to some old hardcore band playing their insistent pounding on your brain, you abandon yourself to the simplest of pure experiences. The earth shatters, moves, bounces up and down, the world is suddenly more bearable, because you feel it on the tips of your toes. You smile every time you see the face of the woman you love, you send a message to the skies, telling them how much you love the color of that woman’s skin.

When Coke is not enough, you can always go back to coffee. That’s why you made enough for about three more mugs.

If the coffee burns, just pour more water. But you have to promise yourself to drink the entire pitcher, otherwise the game of electrifying your brain is suddenly lost to the sounds of the evening cars passing by. And you don’t want to hear that noise, you prefer to keep it in the background, like a still image of a busy street, the colors the lights marking their territory on the road. The sounds disappear, and all you do is just sit and wait until life turns its chaos upside down. That’s when you start to understand things.

Don’t let your body be imprisoned by the long lines that take you to the other side of the world.

I have a tendency to crack, every time I cross the border. It has become an unbearable experience; it may have some underlying political reasons, but those reasons are buried in my conscience. I can no longer state that I feel a sort of contempt for the realities I encounter when I go to the U.S. I mean, I can no longer enunciate them. They are felt, inside of me, a thunderous clap in my belly, the idea of crossing boundaries, an ancient subversion that survives in the genetic history of my blood.
Billboards scare me. The insides of stores, single ideas produced and then presented like some version of happiness on the window display. The face of a young woman, her life a series of tragedies covered by the logo on her shirt, simply greets the oncoming stranger. Suddenly everything falls apart and the mere thought of spending seconds minutes instants browsing through stores becomes an adventure, a voyage, an encounter with a dragon dressed with the hippest clothes in town.

It doesn't help when you're experiencing all of this while 16 oz. of pure black coffee beans picked up in some country forgotten by modern-day processes of recollection, then sent to the U.S., tons and tons of pure black coffee beans then grounded and packaged in bags designed by marketing experts with stress levels rising up to the same altitude as the people who pick those beans on the cold cold mountains, distributed all over the country by people who will soon die of skin cancer or heart attack (as we all) from eating too many 7/11 burritos, then opened in the coffee store by an undergraduate student up to his knees in shool loans who doesn't realize that all the time he's greeting every single costumer with a smile, he's conjuring up a mean ulcer made up of his passive aggressiveness towards picky strangers who never agree on the type of service they receive, then put on the coffee machine until the steam sucks up all the juice from the grounded coffee beans and then served on a too hot cup with a cardboard holder invented by some lawyer from the corporation so as to not deal with stupid people who complain that the cups are too hot. . .so it doesn't hellp that those 16 oz. of pure, black coffee are surging through your veins like a second life support, pumping your heart rate until you can't hear nothing but let's go to that store, I hear they have some cool things there.

I think I need to lay off the coffee. I think I need to lay off the idea that someday my vision of the world I live in will soon fade. Will soon turn into another form of darkness, another form of light.